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About the author

Rebecca Lyman is an Episcopal priest and the Samuel Garrett Professor of Church History at The Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California. A popular teacher and lecturer on church history, she has also been a translator for The New American Bible. Her research and writing focus on the early history and definition of orthodoxy and heresy.

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In this sixth volume of The New Church's Teaching Series, Rebecca Lyman introduces us to the world of the early church. Beginning with the Jewish, Greek, and Roman cultures in which the first followers of Jesus lived and worshiped, she traces the growth of the Christian church's theology, worship, leadership, and ethics through its first six centuries, ending with Augustine of Hippo.

Early Christian Traditions offers perceptive insights into the early church's intense conflicts that reveal the often thin line between orthodoxy and heresy, between true and false teachers, and among the many competing versions of Christianity. Lyman describes the early church's “family quarrels”—Gnosticism, Donatism, Arianism—as well as the theological, political, and linguistic issues that went into the making of the great creeds and established the apostolic tradition. less

Chapter 1 Anglican Identity and Christian TraditionsChapter 2 The World of the Early Church: Romans, Jews, and ChristiansChapter 3 Apostolic Christianity: The Gnostic ControversiesChapter 4 Christianity and Social Crisis: Persecution, Unity, and HolinessChapter 5 Imperial Christianity: The Desert and the CityChapter 6 Who is Jesus? Early Images of ChristChapter 7 Who is God? Trinitarian Orthodoxy from Nicaea to AugustineChapter 8 The Church in Late Antiquity: Saints and Sinners in the City of GodPart 9 ResourcesPart 10 Questions for Discussion

In the press

Rebecca Lyman's Early Christian Traditions should be especially useful to those . . . who know that the early Church is important to Anglicanism but not quite why or how. Lyman's book is a thoughtful, accurate and highly readable introduction. It reflects the best recent scholarship by giving attention to matters such as diversity in early Christian thought and practice, the roles of women, and the ongoing interdependence of Christianity and Judaism, as well as to familiar issues of creed, liturgy and order.